Auschwitz- Birkenau (Poland) and Adele's Butterflies

August 2010
It has been a year now since I visited the Auschwitz Concentration Camp and the Auschwitz II- Birkenau Death Camp Memorial and Museum.  I have written and re-written this post many times in my mind, but I still find it difficult to describe the impact of the experience.  When I decided to make Poland part of my Eastern European travels, I knew that I would go to Auschwitz.

When visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., you receive a card with the name and information about someone victimized in the Holocaust, and at the end of the tour, you  can find out the person's fate.  Going to Auschwitz, I chose to carry the story of Adele in my heart.





I realized I had been preparing to come to Auschwitz and Birkenau throughout my recent journey from Vienna to Budapest to Bucharest to Kyiv to Krakow (see Eastern Europe on the sidebar).  I had heard and sorrowed at the stories of the Holocaust in so many places (see Holocaust  sidebar).   But my preparation to come had started long before that.  As a teenager, I traveled with a folk dance group to Israel, performed at kibbutzim, and met survivors of concentration camps, some of whom even showed us their tattooed numbers.

I have also been in other museums that had empty suitcases, piles of shoes, tangles of eye glasses, hair ready to be sent off to make textiles, and chilling empty canisters of Zyklon-B cyanide from the Holocaust--only the piles of those things were greater here.  They humanize what would otherwise be unfathomable to comprehend. What happened at these camps and during the Holocaust is well documented.  I will not repeat it, but rather share my personal perspective.

 The site of Auschwitz was strangely peaceful.  There was green grass growing, and the buildings were in good repair.  There were no reenactments or models--only the photos and possessions of some  who lived and died there.  Yet, I could not walk through the Arbeit Macht Frei gates (Work Makes One Free) without a heaviness in my heart.  I felt something deeper than sadness (not depression) as I walked through the buildings and grounds--a solemnity of standing on ground made sacred by the needless sacrifice of lives.  The faces of the photos haunted me--innocent children condemned simply because they had been born to Jewish parents; old faces who had seen more sorrow than can be borne; strong faces who had become only numbers in the work camps.


I looked in the interrogation and empty torture chambers of Block 11;  I saw the wall where many were executed; I went  inside the first gas chamber to be used as part of the "final solution."  We then were taken to Auschwitz II-Birkenau, where the railway tracks ended journeys from all over Europe.  While the original Auschwitz  remained primarily a labor camp, it was at Auschwitz II-Birkenau that the trainloads of Jews, gypsies, disabled, and other "undesirables" were sorted--the children, elderly, pregnant, and infirm being sent directly to their death in the gas chamber "showers," while those considered fit to work were bunked in drafty wooden sheds.  The Nazis did not even bother to record the names of those who had only moments left to live.  Many workers did not live very long under the camp conditions.

 At Birkenau,  there seemed to be endless broken chimneys from the ruined gas chambers.  I felt profound sorrow for the victims, but also sadness that  "civilized" people could become so hardened, so past feeling, that they would do such things to others.  I was glad I had come.  I left with a better perspective on the minor bumps  I face in my comfortable life.

I had heard Adele's story many years ago when I was 16.  Many of the details I did not ask for or do not remember, but I have never forgotten what happened.  My father worked at that time with a scientist named Joe, and on occasion our family had invited him and his family to dinner.  His wife, Adele, was quiet and shy, but eventually returned the invitation for us to come to their home.  As I entered, I noticed that she had many pictures of and items with butterflies, and after dinner, I asked her why.  I had known that they were Jewish and from Poland.  Adele told us that she had lived in a Polish village with her family.  Just prior to the invasion of Poland by the Nazis, a regiment of Polish calvary were assigned to their town, and she quickly fell in love with a dashing young Jewish officer named Joseph.  They married, but, within weeks, the Nazis invaded, and his regiment left.  She heard nothing more of him after the speedy Nazi conquest.

I did not ask/do not remember how long it was before the Jews in Adele's village were taken by the Nazis nor the sequence of what happened.  Were they crowded into a ghetto area or sent to a holding camp?  The very name "concentration" camp seems wrong--it was so much worse than just crowding them together.   I believe that Adele and her family ended up at Auschwitz, but, I guess it doesn't matter which camp, because what happened to her was repeated in the other labor and death camps.

The rest of Adele's family was killed--cremated.  Adele was young and strong and was assigned to the labor camp.  She did not share with my family what she had endured, but rather what had given her hope.  She said that some prisoners wished they could be  birds and fly out of the camp, but she had seen soldiers shoot birds for sport.  Rather, Adele loved to watch the little butterflies that would flutter between the rows of barbed wire--never caught and never noticed, always free.  To her, these butterflies became her hope and symbol for freedom.

Adele survived the camp and was freed by the allies.  But how do you put your life back together when everything and everyone is gone?  She had checked in relocation offices for information about the husband she had only known briefly, but found nothing.  Then, one day when she was crossing a bridge in a nearby city, she saw Joseph, and they recognized each other among all the worn faces.  I don't know how long they had searched, or what city it was, or how they recognized each other.  But it wasn't a pretend Hollywood ending:  I was sitting in their house with their children, surrounded with images of butterflies.

I wanted to see a butterfly at Auschwitz, but there were no brilliant Monarchs to be found--only those small, non-descript white ones flying through the wires.  But perhaps those were the very kind Adele had envied.    When I returned home, Lenox was having a sale on its Butterfly Meadow china pattern.  I bought a serving bowl covered with butterflies.  I intend to keep it filled with my hopes for a better world and freedom for all.

Click below for the slideshow:
Auschwitz-Birkenau

Music: Itzhak Perlman, Doyna & Skotshna, In the Fiddler's House